There is a long-but-worth it article (The End) in Portfolio by Michael Lewis, who traces the arc from Liar’s Poker to the End of Wall Street.

Before you turn in fear of yet another Magazine Cover Indicator, be aware of one thing: The prostrate bull on the cover of the magazine does not represent,a s you may have guessed, the stock market. What Lewis is declaring dead is the old way Wall Street used to do business.

When I published my book, the 1980s were supposed to be ending. I received a lot of undeserved credit for my timing. The social disruption caused by the collapse of the savings-and-loan industry and the rise of hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts had given way to a brief period of recriminations. Just as most students at Ohio State read Liar’s Poker as a manual, most TV and radio interviewers regarded me as a whistleblower. (The big exception was Geraldo Rivera. He put me on a show called “People Who Succeed Too Early in Life” along with some child actors who’d gone on to become drug addicts.) Anti-Wall Street feeling ran high—high enough for Rudy Giuliani to float a political career on it—but the result felt more like a witch hunt than an honest reappraisal of the financial order. The public lynchings of Gutfreund and junk-bond king Michael Milken were excuses not to deal with the disturbing forces underpinning their rise. Ditto the cleaning up of Wall Street’s trading culture. The surface rippled, but down below, in the depths, the bonus pool remained undisturbed. Wall Street firms would soon be frowning upon profanity, firing traders for so much as glancing at a stripper, and forcing male employees to treat women almost as equals. Lehman Brothers circa 2008 more closely resembled a normal corporation with solid American values than did any Wall Street firm circa 1985.

Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.

I read this earlier this week. He investigated the subprime market and realized what was going on. The company he was with took the other side of the trade. Later on they realized that they helped that market grow by taking the short side. Pretty interesting read.

Looking at the volume going into this fall is significantly lower than the orignal fall. If I’m correct it means people have drawn the line in the sand and they refuse to sell. Let’s see what happens. If everyone refuses to sell at a low bid it won’t go lower.

BR- Glad to see this on the front page. One of the commentors posted it the other day.

Anyone notice that C is down all the way to $8.50. I would think with all that bailout money their share price would have some support at these levels. Anyone follow C and think there is some news about to come out? How do you value a company with massive losses and a negative balance sheet that is going stay solvent only through government assistance? Insert C, GM, etc.

Is this muted response and current bounce off of breaking the lows on SPX an indication that we’ve already made our “psychological low”…?

This could be a solid entry point for new longs should we pick up some volume on the buying… maybe there were a ton of buyers waiting precisely for a retest/break scenario before committing new capital to equities. That would make sense given the uncertainty surrounding the election following our last low…

Thats the only thing I can think of to describe what we’re seeing now.

I wondered that too, what is the “margin of error” on a retest? How much data to we really have? Many of the trading charts way back in the past were from a non-digital era before people could set up trades to run at exactly “840.23232″ on the SPX or whatever benchmarks they used.

Anecdotally, I noticed that even during the run down UYM behaved itself very well. Picked up a little, let’s see how that does.

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About Barry Ritholtz

Ritholtz has been observing capital markets with a critical eye for 20 years. With a background in math & sciences and a law school degree, he is not your typical Wall St. persona. He left Law for Finance, working as a trader, researcher and strategist before graduating to asset managementRead More...

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